Sharing Strangers’: Strangers in the Village

The idea of strangers in American culture is not a new one. While they tolerated them for their manpower, early 17th Century Puritans referred to Anglican and non-religious settlers as “strangers”. The later arrival of Baptists, Lutherans, and the “dreaded” Quakers was also grudgingly tolerated. But Puritan tolerance was limited in the same manner of later generations who privileged certain groups of immigrants, mostly Anglo people, while barricading American shores against less “desirable” groups, a policy which resulted in the Emergency Immigration Acts of 1921 & 1924. No matter the need, Catholics, Jews and “infidels” (Native Americans) were never accepted into the larger community. In fact, some historians suggest that the infamous Salem Witch Trials may have been a reaction to the perceived threat from “strangers” outside the Puritan church (Mitchell 2008: 25). The most current manifestation of strangers in American culture are of course undocumented immigrants who, like the homeless, have become part of the wallpaper of the urban environment, creatures we experience merely as part of the urban landscape through which we pass daily on our way to our “legitimate” business. Should these creatures make their way into our consciousness by accident, our experience of them is too often limited by the social filter to actually recognize them as fellow human beings. They retreat rapidly from our awareness, once again obscured by the stereotype created to preserve our identity, one carefully constructed on the concept of “other”. Invisibility among strangers is not limited to immigrants, as the work of contemporary artist and immigrant himself, Kryzsztof Wodiczko demonstrates. In a project he has titled Xenology, his term for “the immigrant’s art of survival” (Deutsche 2002: 27), Wodiczko employs his training as an industrial designer to fabricate equipment for those immigrants and refugees who “seek protection from the threat of violence and injustice (Ibid.). His now iconic homeless vehicle can certainly be counted among this work. My paper is not a sociological treatise on immigration. It is rather an essay on “stranger” as perceived outsider in American (and European) Culture. Opening with a brief power point accompanied by Neil Diamond’s America, the text will consider some commonalities between the role of undocumented immigrants and other variations of stranger in culture. It will close with a brief discussion of an installation by Columbian artist, Doris Salcedo, her Shibboleth, sliced into the floor of the Great Turbine Hall at the new Tate Modern in London

The Consumer and the Marketplace

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A guide to organic grassland

Organic farming systems in the UK are traditionally based on ley/arable crop rotations. Up to 70% of the farmed area comprises of mixed grass and legume leys. These leys offer a powerful mechanism for supplying nitrogen through their potential to harvest biologically fixed nitrogen to support both animal production and a subsequent phase of arable cropping. This bulletin answers some of the common questions about organic grassland management

Cranberry Picking Season

Poetry by Lois Beardsle

Animal Health and Welfare in Organic Agriculture

A brief report is given of the 4th Network for Animal Health and Welfare in Organic Agriculture (NAWHOA) workshop at Wageningen in the Netherlands, held in March 2001. The workshop focussed on breeding (especially dairy, pigs and poultry) and feeding, as opposed to yield and productivity, with the emphasis on food quality. Feeding was discussed from two angles: feeding for production, and feeding to protect the animal from disease or parasitic infection. A vision of the future was described, in which higher prices are gained for fewer animals, better housed and with a regional approach to breeding, processing and marketing

Labor-Management Cooperation

[Excerpt] In analyzing labor-management cooperation, it is important to be clear on what it is not. It is not an absence of strikes or conflict. Cooperation is not synonymous with industrial peace. Cooperation may take place even when bargaining leads to work stoppages; conversely, the mere absence of strikes is no evidence that there is labor-management cooperation. In the current period, there is a tendency to equate concessionary bargaining with labor-management cooperation. Demand for and acceptance of givebacks reflect economic pressures and relative bargaining strength and ought not to be interpreted as evidence of a cooperative relationship

The Route to the Top: Female Union Leaders and Union Policy

[Excerpt] Although women now constitute about one third of the members of labor unions in the United States, they are still barely visible in top leadership. To what extent are women currently making inroads in union leadership and what types of union responsibilities do they hold? Is there a glass ceiling? How do the career patterns of women unionists compare with those of men? What can unions do to facilitate their recognition? These are the key questions I examine in this article, drawing on past research supplemented by insights from union leaders I interviewed

Russian Soldiers Move Library!

How does one make plans to move a library from one building, across town, and into a new site when that site is thousands of miles away from where you are in Michigan? One evening I was trying to come up with an idea of how to proceed. Suddenly there flashed into my mind a plan that I quickly wrote down. It was that very plan that we used at St. Petersburg Christian University in Russia. Surely the Lord gave it

Analysis of the dates in six fifth grade American history texts used between 1930 and 1935 and a comparison with six texts in use at the present time.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit